Chi-boy ko gussa kyun aata hai?

Kyunki exam khatam hone par bhi term-2 khatam nahi hua hai..


Tasks to be completed before I feel the term break has really started:

1. Comp Strat project submission - hopefully, we'll do it tonight
2. LDP - course on Advanced Business Presentation Skills

Exams

Again?!? Already?!?

Damn!

Tie-ISB Connect 2006

The Indus Entrepreners & the Wadhwani Centre for Entrepreneurship Development, ISB are organising the TiE-ISB Connect 2006 from September 20th-22nd.

More details and registration information available at - www.tie-isbconnect.com

Tagged!!

I’ve been tagged by Kapil, Nikhil & Swapnil. So here goes...

I am thinking,
Why made Zidane make that fateful header?

I said
something inconsequential, I hope.

I want
a telephoto lens for my camera.

I wish
for Term 2 to end fast

I miss
my car. Badly.

I hear
(right now) the wind.

I wonder
why I quit my job.

I regret
nothing, really. No point regretting anything.

I am
human

I sing
when I’m happy

I cry
when I watch The Man in the Iron Mask

I dance
awfully

I am not
perfect

I write
carefully, cautiously.

I hate
self-centred people

I confuse
myself when writing answers to questions like these.

I should
be sleeping. I should be asleep right now.

I finish
last. Almost always.

I tag
Dee, Tee, & Disco.

Corporate Quiz at ISB

The Net Impact Club of the ISB, in partnership with Asha (Hyderabad), will be conducting a corporate quiz event. The quiz offers participants a chance to pit their brains against the best, win attractive prizes and most importantly lend their support to a deserving cause. The proceeds received from this would go towards the mid-day meals provided to the students at Ramakrishna Upper Primary School at Yellammabanda, Kukatpally, Hyderabad.

The details of the event are as follows –

Date: July 30, 2006
Time: 1:30 P.M. – 5:30 P.M.
Venue: Khemka Auditorium, ISB
Quiz Organizer: J.Krishnamurti (J.K)

More details & registration forms (for participants & sponsors) available at http://www.isb.edu/ACE2006/

Owl snaps

I should've posted these snaps a long time back... I guess better late than never.



I'd posted about this owl ages ago at http://chiranth.blogspot.com/2006/01/avian-visitor.html

Midterms done

Whew!!

The lemon tree and the monkey

It's two days to our mid-term examination, and I ought to be studying. I am, but not to great success. I wandered around the Internet, and finally ended up reading Disco's blog. A couple of quotes from Prof Waterman took me back to another story that one of profs from Engineering had told us.

A trader and his wife moved to a new town. The trader eagerly established his business there, and dedicated himself to the cause of making money. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months, but the trader's business didn't do well.

The wife, religious as she was, decided to seek divine intervention. She'd heard of this sage of infinite wisdom who lived in the forest nearby. People of the town revered him, and believed he could speak to the Gods themselves. The lady approached the sage, and poured out the couple's woes. The sage listened, and suggested they do a yajna. An auspicious date was set, and the sage visited the trader's house. The sage performed the yajna to please the Godess Lakshmi.

After the yajna was over, the sage collected the ash and asked the trader's wife to bury the ash near the roots of a lemon tree. "As the tree bears new fruit", the sage said, "your husband's business will prosper." Then the sage added a condition, "As you place the ash, do not let the thought of a monkey come into your mind."

After-effect of Argentina vs Netherlands

Time : 0850 hrs
C's location: Academic Center 2, Lecture Theater
T's location: SV3, Quad CX, bed

T's phone rings for about 10 seconds. T picks up.

T (in his usual peppy voice): Bol, Chi!!
C (hushed whisper) : class! class!
T (looks at watch) : oh f***!! oh bloody f***!

Biking to Bidar

This post comes a bit late, not due to the delay in getting snaps developed, but because I've been caught in a whirlwhind of Term-2 activity. Well, as the saying goes, better late than never...

We got a term break of five days after our exams last term. I dare say I've made the most of it. First up, I took a train to Vizag to attend Suresh's wedding. Met up with a few people from my previous job.

The day I returned, I packed my bags again as Disco (aka Sumit), Kanika, Tuhin & I headed out for Bidar - by motorcycles. We started off under the cool summer afternoon sun, hit the road to Panjagutta, Begumpet and then reached the highway. Realised after five minutes it was the wrong highway, turned back, hit the road to the correct highway. Finally, we reached the major landmark of Kotpally. Crossed the place, and took our first break for sometime.

A few kilometres later, we came up to an intersection that read "Gachibowli - 5kms left" (Gachibowli is where the ISB campus is located). We'd covered about 35kms of Hyderabad's roads to reach the highway that was right next door :-( Cursing our maps and our map-reader, mostly the map-reader, we trudged along. Stopped for lunch at Sangareddy and hit the road again. The breaks we took were fun, with papayas falling and some people resorting to Tarzan-line antics.

The empty road

in a field we invaded

the falling papayas

Kan-kan playing Tarzan, er.. Jane?

We reached Bidar at around six in the evening. Didn't do much for the rest of the day.. there was dinner at good old Kamat and the opening game of the World Cup.

The next day, we spent about an hour (maybe more) at the Rangeen Mahal of the Bidar Fort. The Rangeen Mahal has lots of intricate designs made by Persian artisans using Mother of Pearl We spent a good deal of time exploring photo-ops in the rest of the fort. There was the solah-khamba masjid with a lawn that's been surprisingly well-maintained.

The roof of a chamber in Rangeen Mahal

In front of the solah-khamba masjid

We headed for Ashtoor afterwards, eight tombs stand tall, but one of them is in a peculiar run-down state. I'm surprised how it still stands.




Our last place of visit was the sacred Nanak Jheera. Legend has it that Guru Nanak came to parched Bidar, moved a few rocks with his feet, and a stream flowed. We wrapped up our trip of Nanak Jheera with lunch at a Punjabi dhaba.

The return to Hyd was pretty uneventful, but with more photo-ops for us. Here are some more snaps from our trip. There are more I've put up on flickr.

The Sun peeps through the clouds..

Tuhin shooting Chiranth shooting Tuhin shooting Chiranth .. ad infinitum


ek, do, teen, chaar

L to R: I, Tuhin, Disco

p.s. The snaps that look brighter and have the date printed on the bottom right corner have been shot off Kanika's camera. The studio made a big fiasco with my snaps when they developed 'em. They scanned the print copies instead of getting the images directly off the negatives :-(

update: I've done what I could using Picasa.. let's hope my snaps look better now.

Time to unwind...

... in a few hours.

Our first term at ISB comes to an end tomorrow. We've got our final two papers - Statistics & Marketing. We had two of them today - Accounting & Economics.

Both the exams we had today were open book. But they were two very different species of open book exams. Accounting was a good one - given a question, one could figure out which part of the prof's handouts one needed to look in to. Economics, on the other hand, was a disaster.. half way into the exam, I closed down all my notes (there weren't many) - their presence added a zero value to my performance.

I hope tomorrow's papers are a little easier on our poor mortal souls.

There's going to be some serious partying by my classmates tomorrow evening. Unluckily for me, I'd be missing all of that as I've a train to catch in the evening. I'd be travelling to Kakinada and from there to Vishakapatnam to attend a wedding. I'd be cut off from the Internet for the next few days. So, if any of you are expecting an e-mail from me, you'd have to wait for a while.

Logging off!

loooong day

I can hear the peacocks screaming somewhere. Having taken over the traditional job of the rooster, they're announcing the arrival of a brand new day. For some people in section C, group 8, it's the end of a day, a long one at that. And for one person within that group, it's two days merging into one.

Yeah, my guess was right. I do sound a bit incoherent after an all-nighter on an assignment. Anyway, the good news is that the Economics assignment is done. After a lot of haggling, I finally set the price of SOMA at $0.77. God knows how I did it, but Ashraf tells me that my procedure was something known as the Monte Carlo method. Really? All I did was run some data through some formulae on a spreadsheet. Never mind, I'll take Ashraf's word for it.

Now the not-so-good news. Today's the last day of term 1 - excluding the exams, that is. We've already bid farewell to Prof Finn yesterday. And today we bid farewell to Prof Vohra & Prof Waterman. Seems like yesterday these profs came in for their first class. Don't know anyone who's come to grips with how soon this term's flown by. If I multiply this by eight, I'd complete my course here in eight flashes. Or eight winks.

I sometimes go through great trouble trying to stay awake in class. Having been awake through the night, I think my troubles just rose exponentially. Let's see how it turns out. Oh and to think of the impending deadline for the Accounting assignment...

50 more minutes, and it'll be time for breakfast :-)

Hsss....

A few weeks back, a brown snake came visiting our Student Village. It'd probably lost its path on the way or something, and it found itself sitting near the stairs of Arjun's quad.

It soon met its death at the hands of the security chaps, turning soon into a mangle of flesh.

Snake in coiled posture

Snake's demise

ISB's pretty rich in wildlife. In fact, if one gets lucky, one might see the whole food pyramid in operation. First, you've got the insects. Then, you have the frogs - and mighty huge ones, too. Some of the frogs here measure up to five inches wide. Then follow the snakes. Finally, you have the peacocks. I'd love to capture a peacock devouring a snake here.. it'd be a darned good shot to take.

sleep - where art thou?

• Rohm & Haas for Marketing
• The weekly quiz for Accounting
• An assignment on Economics
• Reading material on stats

I'm suffering from a serious lack of sleep...

Pink Papers

At about 8:15 in the morning, I opened the door to head to the dining hall for a breakfast. I was speaking to one of my quaddies at the time, and wasn't looking outside the front door. I'd just held the door open and my hand touched something on the outside of the door. For a moment, I thought it was a lizard - there are quite a few of them here on campus, some of them quite colourful. I looked back, a bit startled.. and there it was. A pink paper stuck to the door handle.

A week into ISB, someone (I don't remember who) asked me at lunch (or maybe it was breakfast), "Have you started reading the pink papers yet?" My facial expression quickly transformed to one betraying all of my ignorance. "What's a pink paper?", I asked. "The Economic Times, The Financial Times!", came the reply. I could never make sense of ET & FT all these years, and I don't expect it to start making sense now, just because I'm in a b-school. But maybe some day it will. And I hope that "some day" is within the next 10-11 months.

Anyway, people around me are trying to read stuff. And I've not even figured out where to start my reading - academic or otherwise. I hope some inpiration to read rubs off on me soon.